A letter to my Senator

A letter to my Senator
by David Benjamin

The Honorable Tammy Baldwin
United States Senate
717 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-4906

Dear Sen. Baldwin:

Not too long ago, I went back to my childhood hometown of Tomah to drop off a copy of my latest published novel, A Sunday Kind of Love, at the offices of the Tomah Journal — the newspaper I had read every week when I was growing up, in the living room of my grandparents’ house on Pearl Street. It’s difficult to express my surprise when I got to the Journal office and found that the door was locked.

The Journal was operating. There were people inside. I could see them. But they were locked in. I was locked out.

Perhaps I was more shocked than most people because — for more than seven years — I was the editor of a weekly newspaper, in Massachusetts, the Mansfield News. In that capacity, I couldn’t have imagined locking the door to my office. A locked door — or even a door! — was antithetical to my purpose as the editor of the News. I was the guy in town whom anybody, anytime, could walk in on.

Once, Barney Frank walked in. Another time, a member of a town board who also had business ties to the Patriarca crime family, walked in and told me that he would kill me if I kept reporting his run-ins with the Mansfield Police. I believed him. Three different times, a high school freshman walked in and asked for a job as a stringer for the News. Since I didn’t have a reporting staff beyond myself, I hired each kid and proceeded to teach him the techniques, style and ethics of journalism, as best I could. Each of these exceptional boys thrived at the News. After graduation, they went on to college at Vanderbilt, Georgetown and the University of Chicago.

Today, the opportunity Bill, Frank and Tim had — to learn the news hands-on and close-up, with personal guidance from a “professional” (I use the term loosely, because I never attended an actual journalism school) — doesn’t exist in Mansfield. The News, once an independent newspaper and job press, has been reduced to “penny press” status, after being bought out by an out-of-town regional newspaper chain. The News no longer sits in the Town Hall every night, taking notes on the meetings of the Board of Selectmen, the Health Board, the School Committee, the Zoning Board of Appeals. The News no longer pores trough the police log every Wednesday afternoon, and it doesn’t exert a tireless vigilance over the government and business of the community.

The News has a “telephone editor” now, located in a distant city, transcribing obituaries, wedding announcements and the school lunch menu. Its “coverage” of local political affairs depends on the word of local officeholders issuing press releases. The practice of journalism in Mansfield is extinct.

Recently, I got a heart-warming note from a Mansfield resident, formerly the assistant superintendent of schools and one of my regular targets of scrutiny, who said, simply, “We need you back.”

The same fate has befallen Tomah, where the Journal is now the property of Lee Enterprises, an Iowa “media company” that owns more than 350 weekly and daily publications in 23 states. It’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So is the gigantic Gannett news group, and the McClatchy group, the Tribune Company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, every major television network and radio group. This ownership model is a major reason for the decay of journalism. Most Americans today get what little news they consume — whether online or in print — from immense corporations whose fealty is neither to its readers nor to democracy, but to a handful of wealthy shareholders and to the caprice of the traders on the floor of the Stock Exchange.

This is why I’m proposing to you a possible legislative solution to what has been called “the death of print” and the precipitous decline of professional news-gathering in America.
‘
Another example. My wife, Junko Yoshida, went to work more than 25 years ago for EE Times, a technology journal that simply had no peer in its field. The team Junko joined at EE Times is one of the best groups of newsmen and newswomen I’ve encountered in my career. EE Times, which was privately owned by a husband and wife in Manhasset, New York, had a worldwide staff whose credentials in both engineering and reporting offered its demanding and erudite readers a level of breadth and depth unmatched in its field.

Less than a decade later, after its owners retired, EE Times was purchased by a publicly traded media company that proceeded — in order to meet its quarterly projections — to reduce its scope, fire its journalists, designers and photographers, to close its offices in Europe and Asia, in the Midwest and Northeast. Today, EE Times, which abandoned print several years ago, is sustained heroically by four fulltime reporters, including my wife, and a handful of free-lancers (some of whom, like myself, often pitch in without pay).

Clearly, publicly held media companies — whatever their quarterly results — have done far more harm than good to the practice of journalism in America. And yet, more and more, only publicly held media companies practice journalism in America.

The classic model of the news organization, typified by the old EE Times, but also by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the old Hearst and McCormick empires, still exists. But the paternalism of the grand old newspaper chains is an institution that can’t be revived or replicated in these times. Nor should it be.

Nevertheless, we need a new way. Today, millions of Americans get their news online, often from “aggregators” who compile reports from other sources — including all those dying newspapers — or from profoundly unreliable sites that have a partisan, ideological or outright propaganda agenda. Ironically, the popularity of aggregators poses a reverse-pyramid dilemma. The more people use these typically free sites to consume news originally reported by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post or even USA Today, the fewer people use — and pay for — that information from its real source. As aggregators grow, they imperil the existence of the vital sources from which they aggregate.

Which brings me to my solution. We need more journalists. Not the self-appointed pundits and single-issue bloggers who populate a million parasitic “news” sites on the Web. We need trained, paid professionals who know AP style, who grasp the differences between news, analysis and commentary, who understand the absolute imperatives of attribution and corroboration. We need legitimate news organizations where J-school grads can go for hands-on experience writing the news. We need small newspapers — both online and in print — weeklies, dailies, alternative tabloids that turn young stringers into conscientious reporters and dogged investigators. We need a citizens’ tribune who sits nearby the council table in every community, taking notes, shooting pictures, asking questions, quoting politicians and making them accountable for their words, their actions, their promises and their mistakes.

My solution is inspired by an idea that I first heard floated early in the Obama administration, for a national development bank. Launched with a principal of some $30 billion, its purpose would be to give loans and grants for major infrastructure projects, public, private and hybrid.

My variation: A national journalism development bank. The amount of capital would be much smaller than an infrastructure development bank. Its annual outlay would be, in my estimation, somewhere between $500,000,000 and $1 billion.

The sole purpose of this money would be to pay the salaries of reporters, mostly on the local and regional level, mostly in print and online (rather than television). At an average salary of $50,000 a year, an outlay of a half-billion dollars would employ 10,000 professional reporters.

In fact, since some of this money would cover salaries for lower-paid interns in some big-city newsrooms like those at the Times or the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a half-billion or so would stretch beyond that minimum pool of 10,000 newly compensated journalists — many of whom would be restored to the community of ink-stained wretches after being laid off by Wall Street bean-counters.

You ask, how would this National Journalism Development Fund (NJDF) choose its beneficiaries. Easily. A local news entrepreneur would send in an application form that demonstrates the intent and the credentials to cover the news in, say, Tomah, in competition with the non-doing ghost of the former Journal. Or the local Lee Enterprises stringer for the Journal could send in the same form, vowing to restore the paper’s integrity by staying in town and doing the local legwork the old Journal used to do. Each application would seek enough funding to cover the number of salaries needed to gather and produce the news. All other expenses would be up to the applicant to cover, preferably by selling ads and soliciting sponsors.

Administrators at the NJDF would be tasked to judge applications indulgently. After all, an outlay of $70,000, to cover the salaries of a local editor and reporter, is chump change in the great Washington budget scheme. If, after a year, the little newspaper office couldn’t renew its application because it couldn’t rustle up enough advertising or build its circulation beyond friends and family, the grant would be withdrawn and given to a new set of news entrepreneurs.

Of course, there would to be some sort of oversight. Ideally, the NJDF would hire teams of regional inspectors with a journalism background to monitor the performance of all these new-sprung or rejuvenated newsrooms. What a great job for a retired newspaper editor. These inspectors would focus on each news organization’s commitment to serving the community, providing as much information as possible and doing the journalist’s most vital mission: civic education. All other details, including prose quality, good photography, appealing design, would be secondary.

In short, this is money that should be easy to get and hard to lose. The thing that makes a journalist professional and makes him or her want to be a better journalist is getting paid for the job — not enough to get rich, but enough to offer the assurance that this essential democratic vocation has true and irrevocable value.

Newspeople are a lot like teachers. Firefighters. Cops.

Why do this?

Journalists are a dying breed, literally. Their place is being usurped by amateurs, opportunists and conspiracy theorists. At some point, when the number of responsible, professional, ethical journalists sinks below some point of critical mass, citizens will no longer see enough real news to distinguish it from bullshit. If there’s any doubt that American journalism is approaching that critical mass, I need only cite the political success of Donald Trump, a man who conflates fact and fancy, has no idea that he’s doing it, and has millions of followers who share his seditious ignorance.

And how to pay for it? Where will the billion come from? I suggest that we assess the very people and organizations who right now cling parasitically to the last few bastions of professional news-gathering. Every aggregator provides links to the sources of its blurbs, headlines and news briefs. Every aggregator, in order to collect advertising revenue, assiduously counts every “hit” on its site and every click to every link. These hits and clicks number in the billions. It would be a small matter to monitor all these online visits to all the aggregrators and all their sources and charge each aggregator a tiny fraction of a penny (or, preferably, a whole penny), for each hit, click, link and visit — NOT payable by the consumer. Yahoo, Google and Facebook would have to cough up the pennies.

And if there’s extra money? Give the reporters a raise.

Obviously, all I’m proposing here is a rough sketch of what would be a complicated and contentious law. Cynical old editor that I am, I expect this idea not only to go anywhere, nor do I expect a response. But I urge you to suggest the notion to a few of your colleagues in the Senate, and pass it by a few reporters. The responses will be interesting. My wife, who has seen the depopulation of her own newsroom, told me — at first blush — that I was full of crap. But after reconsidering, she conceded that maybe I’ve got something here. After all, if you take the personnel cost out of the newsroom, everything else suddenly starts to look affordable — especially if you can publish online and don’t have to buy ink, paper and press time.

Sorry if I’m long-winded. But I needed to make the case for the care and feeding of real journalists, and explain why a system of no-strings support for the dissemination of the news, objectively and universally — down to the grass roots — is not only possible in a digital 21st-century America, but necessary.

Sincerely,